


pollux, castor, abel, cain,

by availedobscurity



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Abuse, Death, Gen, I'm Sorry, have you ever seen a tumblr post so sad you started crying?, just some sad sibling stuff for you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-02
Updated: 2017-11-02
Packaged: 2019-01-28 16:41:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12610980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/availedobscurity/pseuds/availedobscurity
Summary: Juno was action and Ben was words and they were supposed to be measured equally, but everyone said that actions were louder.





	pollux, castor, abel, cain,

Juno and Ben Steel had used each other like mirrors, when they were little. They had convinced themselves their own faces were the the same thing, that they were perfect reflections. Ben would wash his face when Juno had a smudge. Juno would try to pick a leaf out of his own teeth when he saw Ben had one stuck among canines and incisors. That was how it worked, for twins. Those were the rules.

Once, Juno and Ben had argued over which one was real and which one lived inside the glass.

 _It’s glass on both sides,_ Ben said, as if it were obvious, and Juno said _I guess you’re right,_ and Ben said, _You guess?_

Juno was action and Ben was words and they were supposed to be measured equally, but everyone said actions were louder.

They took over each other’s lives, sometimes. When they needed to. They were named after protectors, and they were the only things they had to protect. Juno would sub in when Ben needed quickness, anger, stubbornness, fists and quick retribution. Ben would take Juno’s place to show the necessary contrition for the aftermath, to cut an adversary with a lie perfectly shaped to cover them in hairline fissures that would never repair. 

Sometimes one or the other would wonder if maybe one time they mixed each other up and stayed that way, if Ben was supposed to be quick with a fist and Juno was supposed to have the biting tongue. If the one who was supposed to be charming and bright and loved had gotten the wrong name and the world was looking at them in reverse.

Well, names be damned. They knew who they were even if to everyone else they were just the Steel twins, two indistinguishable storms that whipped into a whirlwind stirring through Oldtown. But Juno walked faster and stood up straighter and was quicker to distinguish himself. _I’m Juno Steel,_ he’d say, as if he could say it enough that people would remember that he was himself, not just another Steel. They protected each other, because they had nothing else to protect, but Juno protected Ben more. The perks of being the oldest, the perks of being the strongest. Ben learned to follow, to watch, while Juno got to walk ahead and lead and reach and say, _Think I can jump this?_ gesturing to the new river that coursed through the street when the acid rain wore through the sewer mains, and Ben would say, _Not if I jump it first,_ and then they’d scramble and fight and pull each other back and anyone watching would say _there go those Steel twins_ as if they were one and the same. But they weren’t just the Steel twins. They were always, always Juno and Ben.

Juno always got a little more scraped up. He always reached the other side first, always reached out first. _I’m Juno Steel,_ he’d say, _and this is my brother Ben,_ and Ben didn’t mind being tacked on to Juno’s introduction. Juno deserved to be the one that got noticed. He’d entered the world first. It was his right. They were twins, and those were the rules.

Juno was the one their mother noticed, but not the one their mother cared about.

Her eyes were the same bright blue theirs were, and for a while she could tell the difference between them, every time. They were all the same, really, from the outside; they were all that terrible Steel family that thought they were better than Oldtown, and they all had the same face and the same eyes and they all needed stories to survive but their stories had turned poison and they all suffered for it, and no one else was like them, here or anywhere but especially here.

For years they were all three the same, and that was how they could tell each other apart.

Sarah Steel only noticed one of her sons, because she only hated one of her sons. The other was an accessory, tainted by association, and she wanted to cut him away from his twin so badly. The worst part of it all was that when Juno wasn’t around, when he was hiding in the sewers like he did when he couldn’t take it anymore, Ben was fine. He was always fine. She never did anything to him. Sometimes she even acted like she loved him. Would tell him stories where only a couple of people died in the end, and sometimes they weren’t even her and Juno. Would tell him he was better than this town, better than her, that he was the only good thing she had.

Sometimes Ben would forget he hated her every inch Juno couldn’t, for every moment he saw his twin taking a punishment he didn’t deserve like it was the only thing that made sense to him. For every time Juno tried to be forgiven against his better judgment and Ben’s pleas to just stop trying and get out, go find somewhere to hide, follow Mick Mercury down the highway and go to one of those other towns and come back triumphant and happy and high enough up that Ma couldn’t reach him.

He couldn’t get it through his head that Ben would be fine, that no matter what happened Ben was always fine, that sometimes Sarah Steel would smooth a hand over his hair and say, _a good twin and an evil twin, isn’t that how it always works?_ and then laugh as if it was a joke, as if Ben didn’t want to yank his hands off of him and push her as far away as she could go.

Juno would have, he thought. But he wasn’t Juno.

Juno and Ben used to dress as Andromeda and the Dragon and fight in the kitchen, and they both played their roles perfectly, and they were always quick to put the colander and the spatula and the big green jacket they found in the attic away before their mother got home, except for the days when they didn’t make it, and Ben would try to cover for Juno long enough that he could get away. She should have known they would take turns protecting each other, because that was what happened when you saddled your kids with the names of goddesses and protectors, but it made her angrier than anything to see them try.

They learned a secret language. It was Ben’s idea. Juno needed warnings, needed to be reminded to stay calm, to not act, using words that could not be his mother’s.

It worked, until Sarah Steel got so damn mad at all that nonsense Juno was whispering to her son.

They both privately wondered if anyone would love them, if somehow they were one instead of each being an extra half to a whole thing. Neither of them asked out loud if their mother would love them if they were only one. It was the only question worth asking, and it wasn’t worth asking at all. She was sick. She wanted to give Juno every hurt she had.

Ben hadn’t meant to start pretending to be Juno, at first. It was just, Juno and Ben were finally different enough from her that she couldn’t tell them apart anymore, and one night she started yelling at Ben as if he were Juno, and that night Juno was fine the way Ben always had to be, and Ben thought, _this is what Juno would do._

That was probably why Juno hated it so much, when Ben went to bed with Juno’s bruises. But it wasn’t Juno’s decision, and Ma didn’t like it very much when they argued over which one of them was the monster. She didn’t like to see them protect each other.

Sarah Steel hated that Ben could love Juno. Ben hated that Sarah Steel could love Benzaiten. Juno loved them both, and that was what Ben hated the most, that Juno couldn’t make himself hate Sarah and resent Ben enough to _go_ , to get out, to run.

He should have run, while he could.

When Ben came home to Juno, on the ground, dripping blood and too-still, Sarah Steel over him and yelling at him to _get up, get up, you useless, you monster, get up,_ , all Ben wanted to do was to hurt her enough to make her stop.

When Juno wanted to protect his twin he threw punches. But Benzaiten Steel was different, because he was always too far behind to throw the first punch. Benzaiten Steel used words.

If Ben had known that life was more like the fairy tales his mother told than the ones he and Juno told each other, he might not have done it. Or maybe he would have done more.

 _Ben,_ he said, and ran to his twin’s side, twisting the name into their mother like a knife so that she would stop, that she would get away from him, and the body on the ground didn’t look like Juno anymore. _Ben?_ he asked, sure that if something happened to him he would have felt it, that was how it _worked,_ to be a twin, those were the rules, you felt each other’s stomachaches and wore each other’s bruises and knew each other’s heartbeats would always pound in each other’s ears, he should have felt the moment Juno Steel was gone but his mother was screaming, was shaking him and shrieking and he didn’t get to _feel_ it and you were supposed to feel it, when the world on the other side of the mirror cracked apart.

Ben didn’t know if we would have done it, if he had known. But after that everything finally felt right. Sarah Steel hated him. Sarah Steel loved his twin.

And if only one of them had to be alive, it should have been Juno anyway. He was the oldest. It was his right.

Juno had told Ben so many stories about the rabbits in the sewers, the way he traversed them and found all kinds of weird souvenirs and graffiti and mysteries and how it was so quiet down there, but alive, and how it felt more like home than their house did, and he always tried to get Ben to go down there with them. Ben never went. It was Juno’s place. 

It felt wrong to take something else from him.

But now Juno was dead and in the ground and Ben still needed him, Ben was alive for both of them now and Ben Steel had never really been a person without Juno there to show him how. At least the rabbits _knew_ , and they didn’t hate him for taking his twin’s place even though they knew and they had cared about him and Ben was barely half of what Juno was.

The first time they spoke his and Juno’s language to him Ben found himself sobbing, and the rabbits asked him in his twin’s words, _why? why? why?_ and Ben couldn’t give them an answer because he didn’t know why, he didn’t know how he could be alive without Juno there too.

Ben learned to use his fists and rush forward and take the first risks. It was so much easier when he was doing it for Juno, and he wished he’d known that when Juno was still alive. He hadn’t thought that he’d never needed to know how to save anyone alone. He learned to walk the way Juno walked and avoid Sasha and Mick and avoid his mother and avoid everyone because didn’t they know his twin was dead? Didn’t they know how that changed a person, to be singular after a life spent plural?

He did the only thing he could, the only penance that would have meant anything. Benzaiten Steel kept Juno alive. Because Benzaiten was worthless. Benzaiten could have saved him a million different times.

Or, no. Benzaiten couldn’t have saved anyone. He should have been able to. If roles had been reversed they would both still be alive and in two separate bodies and Juno would be giving him something to follow again. Juno knew how to save people. Juno knew where he was going.

“I’m Juno Steel,” Benzaiten Steel said to the huge-empty-dark sewers that were the last place that had been Juno’s alone, “And my brother Ben is dead.”

“I’m Juno Steel.”

“I’m Juno Steel.”

“I’m Juno Steel.”

He couldn’t stop until the echoed response didn’t sound like a lie anymore, until it didn’t even sound like words anymore, until Benzaiten Steel was dead and gone.

**Author's Note:**

> i saw this tumblr post (https://penumbratrash.tumblr.com/post/166770198227/useless-impossible-headcanon-of-the-week) and started crying immediately and wrote this to cope haha
> 
> anyway hmu on tumblr @alessandrastronger if you want to be impossibly burdened by sadness with me


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